Shipper And Carrier Collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration among shippers and carriers in the transportation industry facilitates more efficient and cost‐effective business solutions that cannot be accomplished by companies operating alone, due to the economies of scope and scale. This article surveys the problem of designing and managing collaborative initiatives to promote both the overall efficiency and the stability of a transportation alliance. We discuss three management mechanisms, each requiring different levels of central coordination and information sharing among the participating entities, and yielding different levels of guaranteed social efficiency and coalition stability. We show that by taking into account the economies of scope and scale that arise in collaboration, a fair and efficient mechanism with limited central intervention can be designed based on analytical tools, such as those in network optimization theory, cooperative game theory, and algorithmic mechanism design. We provide an overview of the existing literature on the topic and discuss the business implications of the results, as well as point out some future research directions.

Efficient Implementation of Collective Extended Producer Responsibility Legislation

“…guidelines regarding the WEEE implementation, the UK DBIS similarly specifies that "an appropriate authority" should determine the allocation mechanism and administer it (Department for Business Innovation & Skills 2013, IPR Working Group 2012). The use of such entities is also common in other network settings such as shipper collaborations (Ergun et al 2010).…”